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Itongadol.- The two-month hunger strike among Palestinian administrative detainees in Israel was brought to an end on Wednesday, the Israel Prison Service confirmed overnight.
At the moment, 75 hunger strikers remain in treatment at nine separate hospitals in Israel, where they were brought a month ago for observation.
According to the Israel Prison Service, the prisoners did not receive any significant concession in order to agree to end the strike, other than that they would not face disciplinary action for the protest. The IPS said they will receive no improved conditions, nothing that is not already required by law, and no end to the punitive measures enacted following the kidnapping of three Israeli teens in the West Bank this month.
There are three major assessments in the IPS for why the hunger strikers decided to call off the strike on Wednesday morning. One, there is the expected passing of a law allowing the force-feeding of hunger-strikers, the desire to end the protest before the Ramadan fast beginning on Saturday, and finally, the belief that following the abduction of the teenagersand amid the IDF operation in the West Bank that has seen hundreds more Palestinians arrested and placed on administrative detention, they do not see any likelihood that Israel will examine the issue of administrative detention in the near future.
"They realized that no one\’s going to talk to them about administrative detentions right now and they\’re not going to get anything," an IPS official said Wednesday.
The IPS denied reports that they had agreed to improve their conditions behind bars. Since the abduction of the teenagers, the IPS has adopted a package of punitive measures against security prisoners including new limits on their monthly commissary and a sharp reduction in their TV privileges and family visits. The IPS has said that the steps were taken following instructions from the government.
The agreement to end the strike came two days after the Knesset delayed a second vote on the bill to allow the forced-feeding of prisoners, as per the demand of Yesh Atid and its party leader Finance Minister Yair Lapid. Two weeks ago, the Knesset passed the first reading of the bill which would allow the force-feeding of hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners, on an individual basis with the approval of a district judge and only if a doctor says the prisoner\’s life is in danger.
The current hunger strike was begun on April 24 by a group of 90 prisoners being held on administrative detention. The controversial practice refers to prisoners being held on suspicion of involvement in security offenses, without being charged. They can potentially be held indefinitely without seeing the charges or evidence against them. Before the West Bank operation began there were about 200 prisoners on administrative detention in Israel.
In the weeks after it began the hunger strike swelled, with other security prisoners joining intermittently, with the number of strikers reaching into the hundreds for days on end. Ever since the abduction in the West Bank however, the number of strikers has steadily declined, with the IPS announcing the declining numbers on a daily basis.
Hunger strikes are a common method of protest by Palestinian security prisoners, and have the tendency to spark solidarity protests among Palestinians outside prison walls.